How Bush’s democratism supercedes patriotism

Spencer Warren agrees with, and expands on, my comment about President Bush and Yalta:

Consider this: A true conservative regards his country in terms of family, community and emotional loyalty (e.g. Lincoln’s “Mystic Chords of Memory”). A leftist, as you explain, including the neocons, doesn’t respect the larger society, but values only individual rights and sees our country only as a legal system with procedural guarantees of such individual rights (but not majority rights).

A leader who goes overseas and trashes his own country, comparing it to Nazi Germany and blaming his country for what Soviet Russia did to Latvia, is not a leader who loves his country as an organic family and community. What would we think of a son who trashes his father before other people? Rather, if, in his ignorant analysis, the nation does not properly promote individual rights, democracy, etc. as an abstraction, regardless of the historical circumstances at the time, he sees his country as no good, without respect and without respect for the president who kept the country united and led it to victory, which effort killed him.

I just want to add, that every single contemporary ideologue who seeks to go beyond his country, as Bush does, claims to follow some “higher” ideal, whether it be the global borderless community, or universal democracy, or the Christian-based sanctity of each human person. The anti-nationalist claims a more “spiritual” ideal than the nation, which, he smugly suggests, is a merely material and selfish, and hence inferior, thing. But in reality the “higher-way” type is pursuing his own secular preference. A global borderless community run by the UN, or an American-led network of multicultural democracies, is simply a different type of worldly political entity than the traditional nation-state, not any higher than the nation, and, in fact, lower than the nation, because it is built on an ideology that reduces mankind to a single principle and thus to a single homogeneous level.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 16, 2005 03:19 PM | Send